Unrelated image from pexels.com to make this post look nicer in social media shares and because I just like lilacs.

You might have guessed from my extremely wordy blogposts that I like writing as well as programming :) Aside from having a personal interest in writing, I think there are some really useful parallels between writing and programming.

Let’s talk about one of them: separating writing and editing. This is a pretty common piece of writing advice, I’ve seen it all over the internet.

More specifically, what separating writing and editing means is that when you start a piece of writing, you don’t edit, you just get your ideas out onto the page. Only after you have a complete first draft, whether that’s a blog post or a novel, do you edit it. Editing can be as simple as fixing typos or as in-depth as moving whole chapters around.

Why is editing while you write such a bad idea? We’ve all written essays for school and edited while we wrote and we survived, right? Well, we did, but we also put in way more effort than we had to. It is totally possible to edit while you write and turn out a perfectly good school assignment, or even a professional article or book, it’s just way more work than it has to be to do it that way. It takes for-freaking-ever too and we’ve all got other things to do :)

Separating writing and editing makes you way faster. Yes it works better if you have a little space between the writing (drafting/outlining) and editing steps, but you’ll spend less time altogether on a piece of writing if you put a day or two between those steps.

But why is that? Writing isn’t that hard, and editing isn’t that hard (to be fair, I’m saying that as someone who has always had an easy time with writing), so what’s the problem?

Part of it is that people just suck at multitasking. Fiddling with your words is a very different task from getting them down in the first place, but I think is the real issue is that editing and writing at the same time is mixing two steps that need to be done one after the other.

It doesn’t actually make sense to worry about how you’re saying it before you’re done sorting out what you want to say in the first place. That’s just going to make a mess.

Okay great, how does this relate to programming?

Programming is in many ways a very similar process to writing. You need to know what you want to do before you can figure out how exactly to do it. Programming is certainly more rigid, with writing you can still make yourself understood with a misspelled grammatical trainwreck, but it’s not so very different either. You can start a piece of writing and know just what you want to say and then discover it just sucks and you have to scrap it and start over.

What you want to do with a program can be more tightly constrained by what’s feasible given the existing system/libraries available/limitations of the language you’re using, but in some ways that makes it easier because there’s no debate over whether your program works or not, you can just run it and find out.

When you’re writing code it’s very simple to separate writing from editing: write pseudocode first. Figure out what you want to accomplish (yes that’s a big enough problem for many books on its own, but that’s another blog post) first, then break it down into simple steps, then start implementing it after you know what you want to do. It may turn out that there’s a technical reason your original plan won’t work, but you can still iterate on that and make a new plan before trying to implement that one.

If you find yourself stuck on a problem, you might be trying to do too many things at once. Try separating what you want to accomplish from how you want to do it.